WarningYour internet explorer is in compatibility mode and may not be displaying the website correctly.
You can fix this by pressing 'F12' on your keyboard, Selecting 'Document Mode' and choosing 'standards' (or the latest version
listed if standards is not an option).

Fluid Blog Posts

Fluid Blog Posts

Groundwater is an important source of irrigation and drinking water, so keeping it pure is crucial. However, once contaminants get in, it isn’t so easy to get them out — creating systems to remove contaminants from groundwater requires an understanding of the complex way immiscible fluids move through soil. To gain insight into this behavior, engineers can use the phase transport functionality in the COMSOL® software.

Categories

Until the early 1900s, shock waves were an academic problem studied from a theoretical point of view only. Many great scientists, including Lord Rayleigh, worked on the field until the theory of inviscid shock waves was established in the 1920s. During World War II, this theory started to be applied, mostly to supersonic vehicles. To study shock waves, one important gas dynamic instrument is the shock tube, which is used to test supersonic and hypersonic flows and high-temperature gases.

Categories

There has always been a debate among engineers working with fluid flow about the suitability of finite element methods for CFD. Some engineers have a firm opinion about the superiority of finite volume methods compared to finite element methods. Is there a scientific support for this opinion? No, not in general. Different methods may be suitable for different problems. Let us see why.

Categories

Even though the first man-made light source used thermal radiation, the effect wasn’t fully understood until the discovery of quantum mechanics. Nowadays, it’s a well-known physics concept. In this blog post, we discuss surface-to-surface radiation theory for the so-called gray body, how to implement it in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software, and an interesting use of this theory.

Categories

After a pleasant day at the beach, you open your car door. It’s warm inside the vehicle, but it’s nothing a little air conditioning can’t fix. Then you sit down. The seat is burning hot, making for an uncomfortable ride home. Fortunately, there’s a way to avoid this scenario: Engineers can use thermoelectric devices that leverage the Seebeck and Peltier effects to control the temperature of car seats (among other applications).

Categories

When setting up fluid flow simulations, we typically focus on a single (possibly a few) components in a larger system, such as a pump or sedimentation tank in a water treatment plant. Naturally, this raises a question: At what distance can we apply boundary conditions without interfering with the process? In this blog post, we look at the effects of the proximity of inlet and outlet boundaries for interior and exterior flows of a homogeneous fluid with negligible compressibility.

Categories

Heart failure is a global health concern, affecting millions of people and keeping them from their everyday lives. But what if there was a device that could keep patients’ hearts pumping and even improve their quality of life? In his keynote presentation at the COMSOL Conference 2018 Boston, Freddy Hansen from Abbott Laboratories discussed a heart pump that could do just that. If you missed his talk, you can watch a recording of the video and read a summary below.

Categories

Did you know that the COMSOL Multiphysics® software allows you to have different discontinuous meshes in neighboring domains? Although the usual default behavior of the software is to use aligned meshes, there are times when we might like to have discontinuous meshes, such as for modeling conjugate heat transfer. Let’s delve deeper into this topic and see how these meshes can save us time and memory in our initial model development with just a little bit more effort.

Categories

Imagine that you’re indoors during a thunderstorm, watching raindrops trickle down the window. Despite the storm, you remain dry and warm thanks to the building envelope protecting you from the outside environment. To design a well-functioning building envelope, engineers need to account for a variety of different factors. Simulation can help address this need.

Categories

Sparging, a mass transfer process between a gas and a liquid, is commonly encountered in industrial applications such as beverage carbonation and photobioreactors, or even at home for aeration in aquariums. In this blog post, we detail how to model a type of sparging, carbonation, using the COMSOL Multiphysics® software.

Categories

Efficient, cost effective, and environmentally friendly, friction stir welding (FSW) is useful for many applications. As the name implies, this process involves using friction to heat materials and then stirring them together. For optimal FSW performance, the generated heat has to be just the right temperature: Too high and the materials melt, weakening the weld; too little and the process is inefficient. Using the COMSOL® software, you can evaluate and improve heat transfer in the FSW process.

Categories

Until the early 1900s, shock waves were an academic problem studied from a theoretical point of view only. Many great scientists, including Lord Rayleigh, worked on the field until the theory of inviscid shock waves was established in the 1920s. During World War II, this theory started to be applied, mostly to supersonic vehicles. To study shock waves, one important gas dynamic instrument is the shock tube, which is used to test supersonic and hypersonic flows and high-temperature gases.

Categories

Heart failure is a global health concern, affecting millions of people and keeping them from their everyday lives. But what if there was a device that could keep patients’ hearts pumping and even improve their quality of life? In his keynote presentation at the COMSOL Conference 2018 Boston, Freddy Hansen from Abbott Laboratories discussed a heart pump that could do just that. If you missed his talk, you can watch a recording of the video and read a summary below.

Categories

There has always been a debate among engineers working with fluid flow about the suitability of finite element methods for CFD. Some engineers have a firm opinion about the superiority of finite volume methods compared to finite element methods. Is there a scientific support for this opinion? No, not in general. Different methods may be suitable for different problems. Let us see why.

Categories

Did you know that the COMSOL Multiphysics® software allows you to have different discontinuous meshes in neighboring domains? Although the usual default behavior of the software is to use aligned meshes, there are times when we might like to have discontinuous meshes, such as for modeling conjugate heat transfer. Let’s delve deeper into this topic and see how these meshes can save us time and memory in our initial model development with just a little bit more effort.

Categories

Even though the first man-made light source used thermal radiation, the effect wasn’t fully understood until the discovery of quantum mechanics. Nowadays, it’s a well-known physics concept. In this blog post, we discuss surface-to-surface radiation theory for the so-called gray body, how to implement it in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software, and an interesting use of this theory.

Categories

Imagine that you’re indoors during a thunderstorm, watching raindrops trickle down the window. Despite the storm, you remain dry and warm thanks to the building envelope protecting you from the outside environment. To design a well-functioning building envelope, engineers need to account for a variety of different factors. Simulation can help address this need.

Categories

After a pleasant day at the beach, you open your car door. It’s warm inside the vehicle, but it’s nothing a little air conditioning can’t fix. Then you sit down. The seat is burning hot, making for an uncomfortable ride home. Fortunately, there’s a way to avoid this scenario: Engineers can use thermoelectric devices that leverage the Seebeck and Peltier effects to control the temperature of car seats (among other applications).

Categories

Sparging, a mass transfer process between a gas and a liquid, is commonly encountered in industrial applications such as beverage carbonation and photobioreactors, or even at home for aeration in aquariums. In this blog post, we detail how to model a type of sparging, carbonation, using the COMSOL Multiphysics® software.

Categories

When setting up fluid flow simulations, we typically focus on a single (possibly a few) components in a larger system, such as a pump or sedimentation tank in a water treatment plant. Naturally, this raises a question: At what distance can we apply boundary conditions without interfering with the process? In this blog post, we look at the effects of the proximity of inlet and outlet boundaries for interior and exterior flows of a homogeneous fluid with negligible compressibility.

Categories

Efficient, cost effective, and environmentally friendly, friction stir welding (FSW) is useful for many applications. As the name implies, this process involves using friction to heat materials and then stirring them together. For optimal FSW performance, the generated heat has to be just the right temperature: Too high and the materials melt, weakening the weld; too little and the process is inefficient. Using the COMSOL® software, you can evaluate and improve heat transfer in the FSW process.